Peter Hess on Continuing Infatuation of American Public with Rapture Thinking

Peter Hess at Huffington Post on the continued appeal of "rapture thinking" among Americans: 

Warmed-Over News: Some Final (?) Nagging Questions about the Corapi Story

This is old news.  And nothing is less appetizing than a warmed-over dish of last week's hot news.  

Terry Weldon on Catholic Role in New York Marriage Equality

I'm just now seeing Terry Weldon's outstanding analysis of the role played by Catholics in the human rights victory in New York last week, at his Queering the Church blog.  Terry centers his commentary about why growing percentages of Catholics support marriage equality around family values, a theme that resonates with Catholics, values they want to see extended to others seeking to form stable, productive, generative unions that build stable, productive, generative societies.  Terry writes:

Lincoln Mitchell on Obama's Marriage Equality Miscalculation: Leadership Failure

And talking further about being stuck in 1967 while people with good sense and sound consciences want to move towards 2011: here's Lincoln Mitchell at Huffington Post today on the colossal political miscalculation Mr. Obama is making with his retrogressive, principles-lite stand on marriage equality:

Baseball Tim and Manly Bishops: Sports, Machismo, and 1967 Prescriptions for a 2011 World

Speaking of being stuck in 1967, have you ever noticed how those bishops the luminaries of the American Catholic intellectual center keep supporting just don't know how to quit those nifty macho sports metaphors, when they talk about women theologians (and here and here) or gay men?

What's that all about, I wonder?  You'd almost think that the sports metaphors are deliberate, and chosen to demonstrate the macho power God wants His bishops to exercise over others.

Bishops who are, let us not forget, each and every one of them heterosexual to a man. 

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner: American Catholics Throw a Human Rights Party

National Catholic Reporter has now posted a good reflection--Jamie Manson is the author of this piece--about the recent human rights breakthrough with marriage equality in New York.  Manson (rightly) stresses the growing disparity between what the Catholic hierarchs (and their centrist apologists: my addition to the analysis, and not something Jamie says) want to think about marriage equality, and what growing numbers of Catholics think about the issue.  As Catholics.   

New York Victory and Unfinished Business: Catholic Church Still Anything but a Welcoming Place (4)

And so my response to the question a blogger at the Catholic blog site Commonweal  asked me several days ago, which I’ve chosen to answer here and not at the Commonweal site (to make sense of this opening statement, you’ll need to read my posting of earlier today):